Access to Notable American Women

Journeying together in this fortieth-anniversary year of Notable American Women, our first guidepost is the copyright notice. The dictionary has a valid copyright dated 1971 by the President and Council of Radcliffe College. In 1999, Harvard and Radcliffe officially merged. The copyright holder is now the President and Fellows of Harvard College, based on the copyright notice in the fifth volume, published in 2004. While the three-volume set is now out of print, copyright continues in force until 2067.

I cannot legally reprint entire biographical sketches from Notable American Women, but the doctrine of fair use allows me some right to quote short passages. In the previous post, I linked to each volume's page on Amazon. Purchasing a copy of the three-volume set is one way to follow along with this blog. (In the interest of full disclosure, each time you click an Amazon link in this blog, I receive credit as an Amazon associate. If you purchase a book from Amazon through one of my links, I will receive a commission. The author and publisher will be likewise compensated for their work.)

Over two thousand libraries have a copy of the dictionary on their shelves. Worldcat.org can help you find one near you. Some copies are in the reference collection and will not circulate, but some libraries, including my alma mater, San Jose State University, will loan a copy to cardholders.

San Jose State University likely allows its copy to circulate because every word of the dictionary has been scanned and indexed in the Scholar's Edition of the database Women and Social Movements in the United States, 1600-2000. Libraries subscribe to the database and make it available to members of its community through the Internet, either remotely or on the library's computers. If you have access to an academic library, you may be able to follow along in the dictionary online with each blog post.

Google Books is a project that scans published works and makes them available to read online, either in whole or in part. Copyright law allows anyone to reprint material in the public domain, which gives Google the right to scan and distribute entire books of a certain vintage over the Internet. Google has also scanned images of books still under copyright, and through agreements with the publisher or copyright holder, allows readers to view a certain number of pages for free. (This is the same principle that guides Amazon's Search Inside the Book feature.)

Volumes 1-3 of Notable American Women are available for search either through Amazon or Google Books. You may or may not be able to access a particular biographical sketch, but if that is the only access you have to the dictionary, it is better than nothing.

Notable American Women: A Biographical Dictionary, 1607-1950

In 1971, Harvard University's Belknap Press published

Notable American Women: A Biographical Dictionary

, edited by Edward T. James, Janet Wilson James, and Paul S. Boyer. Its 3,152 pages filled three volumes, including 1,359 biographical sketches for individual American women who lived and died between 1607 and 1950.

The dictionary grew out of a 1955 proposal from Harvard University professor of history Arthur Schlesinger. In his role as the chairman of the Advisory Board of Radcliffe College's Women's Archive, he set the board to investigate the need for a dictionary of American women. (That archive has since become the Arthur and Elizabeth Schlesinger Library.) By 1958, Radcliffe had agreed to sponsor the project, and editorial work began under the direction of Edward T. James.

The new work's model was to be the Dictionary of American Biography (DAB), ten volumes of 15,000 entries published between 1926 and 1936 under the auspices of the American Council of Learned Societies. Between 1944 and 1995, ten supplemental volumes appeared, of which Edward T. James had been an associate editor. DAB included 706 entries for women. The editors' first task was to assemble a card file of potential biographical subjects, and the DAB entries became the nucleus. Editors culled other entries from encyclopedias, Who's Who compilations, and earlier compendia of female biography. Histories of fields where American women were particularly active yielded more names. When the card file had grown to over 4,000 names, the editors classified each entry by occupation, and sent each category to an expert in that field. From these recommendations and their own research, the editors chose 1,359 American women.

The editors commissioned authors who had a special knowledge of the subject or of her field to compose biographical sketches. In all, 738 contributors submitted sketches. Each author was to establish certain basic facts supported in a bibliography: the subject's ancestral and geographic background, her father's occupation (and her mother's, if she worked outside the home), and her order of birth in the family; her schooling and religious affiliation; the date of her marriage or marriages, the husband's name and occupation, and children's names and birth dates; and the cause and place of death and place of burial.

This dictionary, this "venture in cooperative scholarship," in the words of the authors, was intended set in motion future research and analysis. The project itself yielded two more publications:

Volume 4, The Modern Period

(published in 1986 in 816 pages, with 442 entries, and edited by Barbara Sicherman and Carol Hurd Green), profiled American women who had died between 1951 and 1975.

Volume 5, Completing the Twentieth Century

(published in 2005 in 768 pages, with almost 500 entries, and edited by Susan Ware and Stacy Braukman) profiled, as the title suggests, women who died between January 1, 1976, and December 31, 1999.

Students have mined Notable American Women to produce countless papers, then refined that ore into many thousands of dissertations and books. In its fortieth anniversary year, I intend to return to the mother lode and estimate what treasure it has born. Each day this blog will feature a woman whose biographical sketch appeared in the first three volumes of the dictionary. I will compare the 1971 single-author sketch (with editorial review) with the woman's entry in Wikipedia, a "venture of cooperative scholarship" that the editors of Notable American Women could scarcely imagine when they began their research in 1958. Beyond Wikipedia, each day's blog entry will update the 1971 bibliography with the products of the mother lode: articles, dissertations, and books that have led us further into the life of that woman over the past forty years.

My goal is to honor Notable American Women, highlight the strengths and weaknesses of Wikipedia as a new jumping-off point for student research, and encourage new scholarship in women's history.